 Turning the spotlight to our other Sister Spit artists, we have the magical Creatrix Tiara! You can help bring Tiara and other Sister Spitters on the road by donating to the Sister Spit fundraiser! Creatrix Tiara works with creative arts & media, technology, games, community cultural development, and education to explore ideas around community, identity, liminality, belonging, and social justice. Tiara is very interested in exploring the ways that various mediums can be used to convey and support experiences of transience and flux while also building empathy and understanding for experiences and stories outside one's own. In 2018 Creatrix Tiara wrote, produced, and performed in their first full-length theatre show, Queer Lady Magician, exploring stage magic through a queer, feminist, decolonial lens. Tiara also performs and produces for LGBTQIA+ disability arts collective Quippings, was a Dandy Minion and Burlesque Dancer in the 2017 Melbourne Festival production of Taylor Mac's 24 Decade History of Popular Music, produced and performed for San Francisco South Asian women's theatre program Yoni Ki Baat, and has made work across US, Australia, and elsewhere. from the artist Describe your work in five words. Liminal, interdisciplinary, vulnerable, passionate, curious What are some of your artistic influences/inspirations? I'm a big Darren Hayes (ex Savage Garden) fangirl and he's pretty much why I'm an artist nowadays. Mama Alto is an amazing queer transfeminine non-binary POC jazz cabaret diva who also does a TON of work supporting Melbourne's queer/PoC/gender-diverse/indie artist communities - she's made SUCH a difference to my artistic career. Blake Maxam is a Bay Area-based stage magician who also does a lot of community advocacy as a queer trans woman - she's the one who got me back into stage magic and is such a sweetheart!! I'm also very influenced by the Internet and online culture - I've practically lived online since I was about 9 (as an older Millenial this was actually uncommon) and I probably wouldn't be alive, let alone thriving, without it. What upcoming writing projects are you working on? A lot of my writing projects nowadays aren't necessarily the traditional-publishing kind: I do a lot of work in writing for stage, games, and online media, amongst others. Amongst them, I'm working on sequel for my stage magic + storytelling + social justice show Queer Lady Magician (I'll be performing versions of the original show during Sister Spit!), playing with ideas of charm and manipulation, with the aim to produce not just a stage show but also an Alternate Reality Game narrative component around it, multidisciplinary project (writing + performance + VR +++) with a group of others from Muslim backgrounds exploring our relationships to Islam, mysticism, diaspora, Indigeneity, and identity, using archetypes like the Djinn, the Witch, and the Faerie, and a YouTube series explaining the stage magic references in the Ace Attorney games! Excerpt from Queer Lady Magician
P. C. Sorcar made it his life mission to unearth the roots of stage magic, deep from within Bengal and the Subcontinent, and present it to the world. Contemporary magic tricks performed back in the 9th century, esteemed university classes about the Art and Science of Magic, ancient Sanskirt scripture about Lord Krishna's own training in the art. P. C. Sorcar decided to call himself the World's Greatest Magician, which unnerved a lot of White Western magicians of the time - but many of them called themselves exotic Oriental magicians with exotic Oriental names, so who are they to complain really? No one was more unnerved by P. C. Sorcar, however, than the White Western colonialists of the British Raj. P. C. Sorcar, World's Greatest Magician, would go up to them at fancy parties, give them some paper, and tell them "here, write whatever you want". And then they would find that they have instead signed away promises to award P. C. Sorcar a medal - or even the title of Prime Minister! He escaped every jail, shackle, and cage the colonialists could put him in. His stage magic was in service to a revolution - inspiring the people of the Subcontinent to break their own colonial cages. In the words of Kazi Nazrul Islam, another Bengali revolutionary artist: Kararoi lohu kopat, bhenge phel kore lopat! "Those iron doors of your prison! Smash them, make them disappear!" And so they did! The people rose us to smash those iron doors and made the British disappear. But in their place, the Brits put in partitions. Bengal, rooted in culture and language, the birthplace of P. C. Sorcar and Kazi Nazrul Islam and Zahirul Haq Khan, was split in two: the Hindus went to India, the Muslims were given to Pakistan. And Pakistan wanted all traces of Bengal gone. We own you, they said. You will only speak Urdu, our language, not anything else. You are not Bengal, you are East Pakistan, you are ours and you shall comply. The Bengalis weren't having it. Kararoi lohu kopat, bhenge phel kore lopat! "Those iron doors of your prison! Smash them, make them disappear!" And so they rose up, smashing those new iron doors, fighting for the right to speak their own language. The scholars and artists and social reformers were on the front lines, organising general strikes and sieging institutions of power. A group of engineering Masters students in Turkey, on scholarship from the Pakistani government, wrote and published an open letter declaring their support for the Bangladesh Liberation movement. So Pakistan retaliated - and aimed for the scholars and artists and social reformers first. The engineering students in Turkey lost their scholarships, but they were lucky. Their peers back home were the first to lose their lives. Comments are closed.
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